BIM-GIS INTEGRATED GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION MODEL USING SEMANTIC WEB AND RDF GRAPHS

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume III-4, 2016 XXIII ISPRS Congress, 12–19 July 2016, Prague, Czech Republic BIM-GIS INTEGRATED GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION MODEL USING SEMANTIC WEB AND RDF GRAPHS A-H. Hor a, A. Jadidi a, , G. Sohn a ∗ a GeoICT Lab, ESSE Dept., York University, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON M3J1P3, Canada (elhadi, mjadidi, gsohn)@yorku.ca Commission IV, WG IV/7 KEY WORDS: BIM, GIS, IFC, CityGML, Semantic Web, RDF Graph, SPARQL ABSTRACT: In recent years, 3D virtual indoor/outdoor urban modelling becomes a key spatial information framework for many civil and engineering applications such as evacuation planning, emergency and facility management. For accomplishing such sophisticate decision tasks, there is a large demands for building multi-scale and multi-sourced 3D urban models. Currently, Building Information Model (BIM) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are broadly used as the modelling sources. However, data sharing and exchanging information between two modelling domains is still a huge challenge; while the syntactic or semantic approaches do not fully provide exchanging of rich semantic and geometric information of BIM into GIS or vice-versa. This paper proposes a novel approach for integrating BIM and GIS using semantic web technologies and Resources Description Framework (RDF) graphs. The novelty of the proposed solution comes from the benefits of integrating BIM and GIS technologies into one unified model, so-called Integrated Geospatial Information Model (IGIM). The proposed approach consists of three main modules: BIM-RDF and GIS-RDF graphs construction, integrating of two RDF graphs, and query of information through IGIM-RDF graph using SPARQL. The IGIM generates queries from both the BIM and GIS RDF graphs resulting a semantically integrated model with entities representing both BIM classes and GIS feature objects with respect to the target-client application. The linkage between BIM-RDF and GIS-RDF is achieved through SPARQL endpoints and defined by a query using set of datasets and entity classes with complementary properties, relationships and geometries. To validate the proposed approach and its performance, a case study was also tested using IGIM system design. 1. INTRODUCTION 3D virtual indoor/outdoor urban models provides the key information for many purposes such as evacuation planning, emergency and facility management (Chan et al., 2013). Such applications require both 3D geometry and complex semantic information in different scales and domains (Karan and Irizarry, 2015). Building Information Model (BIM) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are broadly used as sources of such applications. However, integrating BIM and GIS poses great challenge since these two data formats are semantically inconsistent for any building systems and sub-systems analysis (Borrmann et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2013; El-Mekawy et al., 2012; Irizarry et al., 2013; Isikdag et al., 2013; Li and He, 2008; Mignard and Nicolle, 2014). In fact, BIM is rich intelligent digital repository of building information and uses an Object Oriented (OO) approach to describe the characteristics (semantics and geometry) and behaviour of each building element as well as its relationships with others (Eastman et al., 2010). Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is the open standard format for BIM by establishing interoperability in the construction industry (El-Mekawy et al., 2012) . On the other hand, GIS is a platform for managing and presenting spatially referenced information. CityGML is established by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard data model for exchange of geospatial data and the interoperability between 3D GIS systems (Yao et al., 2015). Indeed, BIM and GIS share the foundation concepts that bring these two domains become closer together. However, the ∗ dissimilarities such as spatial scale, level of granularity, geometry representation methods, storage and access methods, and semantics mismatches make the integration of BIM and GIS complex and difficult to achieve (Borrmann et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2013; El-Mekawy et al., 2012; Irizarry et al., 2013; Isikdag et al., 2013; Li and He, 2008; Mignard and Nicolle, 2014). Many researchers from both GIS and BIM communities have been working on developing conceptual geometric models, mainly designed for visualization purposes (Borrmann et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2013; El-Mekawy et al., 2012; Irizarry et al., 2013; Isikdag et al., 2013; Li and He, 2008; Mignard and Nicolle, 2014). However semantic models are more needed for different engineering and planning applications to enable complex queries and analysis for facilitating sophisticated decision tasks (Stadler and Kolbe, 2007). BIM-GIS integration and data sharing can be composed into syntactic and semantic aspects of data integration. The syntactic aspect of the data integration is about access to the shared data in the other domains; while the semantic aspect involves incorporating the information from the domains into a new data structure of a consuming system. The syntactic approach focuses more on data conversion and developing translation algorithms from one format to the other resulting of many BIMGIS packages and software extensions. This mainly allows access and use of geospatial data within BIM and BIM semantics data within GIS context (Alam et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2013; El Meouche et al., 2013; El-Mekawy, 2010; ElMekawy et al., 2012; Li and He, 2008). In the other hand, the Corresponding Author This contribution has been peer-reviewed. The double-blind peer-review was conducted on the basis of the full paper. doi:10.5194/isprsannals-III-4-73-2016 73 ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume III-4, 2016 XXIII ISPRS Congress, 12–19 July 2016, Prague, Czech Republic semantic integration is based on the ability to attach meaning to conventional concepts for structuring the domain knowledge about phenomenon or objects (El-Mekawy, 2010; Karan et al., 2015; Mignard et al., 2011; Stadler and Kolbe, 2007). The RDF graph as a data model used by semantic web technologies brings many in developing integrated data models that can have a huge impact in GIS, BIM integration mainly because: - RDF and RDFs (RDF schema) are standards offering richer class and property modelling and inference compared to RDBMS, NoSQL counterparts Flexibility and ability to make ad-hoc RDF statements about any resource of BIM or GIS without the need to update global schemas. SPARQL queries can contain optional matching clauses that work well with spare data representations. Shared ontologies from both BIM and GIS will facilitate merging data from different sources Graph theory is well understood and a lot of data related problems are better solved using graph data structures. And, given that semantic web technologies are internet based and supports HTTP proto (...truncated)